


Won't You Tell 'Em I'm Mad

by deandatsgay (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adolescent Sexuality, Age difference (14 year old Dean and significantly older OMC's and John), Anal Sex, Bottom Dean, Dirty Talk, Disturbing Themes, Face-Fucking, Lolita!Dean, M/M, Mentally unstable characters, Oral Sex, Parent/Child Incest, Prostitution, Submissive/Bottom Dean, UST, heavily implied daddy!cest, sort-of-hustler!dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-03
Updated: 2013-09-03
Packaged: 2017-12-25 11:52:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/952751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/deandatsgay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ellen thought it was a curse: a succubus, incubus, siren, skinwalker. But it wasn’t supernatural (wasn’t natural, though, not at all). It was just hunger. Primal, basic, sharpened by the sour stretch of hormones and the black holed damage that sizzled on his skin, hunger. (Fill for Ellen being worried about underage!Dean's provocative behavior with/hustling of older male Roadhouse customers and approaching a John who is trying to avoid Lolita-esque!Dean's charms himself.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Won't You Tell 'Em I'm Mad

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alexa_dean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexa_dean/gifts).



> This is because of and for skeletncloset. I misread the original prompt but she said this was an okay interpretation. Hope you like, bb! I imagine Jason as Wentworth Miller and Gray as Dominic Purcell. Song title and Dean’s characterization influenced by Kid Cudi’s “Mad Solar”.

_People think I’m mad_  
 _Won’t you tell ‘em I’m mad...solar_  
 _All the things that bother me_  
 _Ain’t no other way I can be_  
-           _“Mad Solar”, Kid Cudi_  
  
The sky is black, cotton thick, offering a fog of darkness to hide them from peering eyes. Ellen is thankful, both for Dean’s shame (or lack thereof) and for her own sanity. She doesn’t want to  _see_ this.  
  
Night provides little to muffle the sounds they make, though. It is somehow more grotesque to only hear the chilling zip and cold clang and thick rustle of Wrangler’s being pulled to knees Ellen has seen broken.  
  
 _Christ, Gray_ , she thinks as the shapeless, helpless wave she can’t see but knows must be Dean sinks to the asphalt.  _What the hell are you doin’?_  
  
She could think the same of Dean, but she knows the answer to that question.  
  
Dean has been itching the entire week he’s been here: his movements were sharp, his moods sullen, his hands incapable of remaining still. He fluttered through the Roadhouse, shaking delicate, hummingbird on edge, an addict who could practically  _taste_ the smack in his blood but couldn’t reach it.   
  
The first two days, Ellen thought he was aching to cut his teeth on the edge of the hunt. There was something quiet calm but wild in the kid’s eyes: they were too green, too dim, too thin. He’d seen too much for a boy a month shy of fifteen. One look at the way he twisted restless in his chair told her John was as shit of a father as he was of a partner.   
  
Then Jason fuckin’ Larson strolled into the bar and the ashen sheen of Dean’s face had sloughed to the floor, leaving Dean’s skin bright, flushed pink, lips and cheeks heat bitten.   
  
Ellen thought it was a curse: a succubus, incubus, siren, skinwalker. But it wasn’t supernatural (wasn’t natural, though, not at all). It was just hunger. Primal, basic, sharpened by the sour stretch of hormones and the black holed damage that sizzled on his skin, hunger.   
  
It was just a crush, she thought then: a stupid, misplaced, shivering crush. There was no place for her words on the matter. Dean wasn’t her son, her concern. She also wasn’t going to go sticking her hands or heart in John Winchester’s business. That man was going to get him and his boys hurt or killed or worse if he kept thundering through the way he was now, the way he had been.  
  
She ignored – she  _tried_ to ignore – the way Dean lingered at the bar that night. The past nights he’d sat in a back table with Sam, talking, reading, writing to each other with letters Ellen couldn’t piece together.   
  
After Jason slid onto a barstool, Dean had taken Sammy’s hand and led him back to the room they shared. His eyes had grazed Jason’s, cool, no hint of a smile or the childish affection Ellen had imagined. There had been a slash of something bright, fierce, but she had seen nothing of the precocious, protective, restless boy she knew.  
  
Ellen couldn’t piece that look together, either (although she had seen that bone bare flash before, in faces more hallowed and hollowed than Dean’s, and she knew that white gleam like she knew the hungry shine of vampire fangs, but she buried it, told herself she couldn’t fathom it). She kept her eyes on the bar as she wiped it.  
  
“Those are Winchester’s boys,” she said, casual, swiping stains that weren’t there.  
  
“Hmm.”  
  
Jason had muttered nonchalant, as if his gaze wasn’t still on the doorframe where Dean had paused.   
  
“Oldest is fourteen.”  
  
“Hmm,” he’d repeated. “Looks older.”  
  
When Dean had come back into the bar, Jason had moved to a table, couple he hunted with a few times on the other side, laughing. Dean took the stool next to the one Jason had been occupying.   
  
He sat there all night.  
  
He chatted to Ellen softly, asked questions, laughed joyful and bright. Jason’s gaze must’ve been heavy on his spine, weighing on his shoulder blades, because he watched Dean the entire time, eyes dancing over Dean’s angles with heat even Ellen could feel. Dean didn’t acknowledge him.   
  
Dean ate peanuts, fingers crushing the skin with deft, delicate movements, tongue snaking out to curl the peanuts into his mouth, tongue snaking out again to lick salt from his fingertips. At one point, Ellen had thought she was going to have an aneurism and had snapped at Dean to  _stop_ eating those peanuts like he was trying to get them to return the favor. The boy’d had the decency to stop, at least, and his skin had flushed baby pink, but his little smile had been more satisfaction than proper mortification.  
  
He played with the toothpicks, rolling his fingertips up and down the rack. He played with the straws, twirling them between his forefingers, dragging the tip of one in horizontal lines along his bottom lip, red plastic sinking into pink flesh. He’d popped the very tip past his lips, curled them in an ‘o’, and sucked it deeper into his mouth, slurping, until Ellen had yanked it from between his teeth and told him to get his ass to bed.  
  
Twenty minutes hadn’t passed before she headed to the supply room for another cast of napkins to find Jason pressing Dean against the wall.   
  
  
Shadows drifted listless over half their bodies, veiling the most damning of sights: she could see Jason’s forearm resting against Dean’s elbow, but not his fingers curling around Dean’s wrists; she could see Jason’s knee digging into Dean’s a giving thigh, muscle still cradled with soft, fresh flesh, but not hard cased, trembling denim pressed together; she could see Jason’s cheek on Dean’s jaw but not his lips on Dean’s ear.  
  
“You tryna’ seduce me with that act at the bar?” Jason breathed.  
  
“Tryin’?” Dean had laughed, cocky gauze draped wine rich through his voice. She saw his face shift, watched his mouth move over Jason’s jaw, lips scraping stubble, but it looked like it stung Jason more hotly. “Think I  _succeeded_.”  
  
“Yeah?” Jason had asked. His body had bucked. Ellen had wanted to claw her nails through the dark back of his neck, yank his body away from Dean and his skin from his body, but she had stayed behind the doorframe. It wasn’t her place. Dean’s not a man but he’s seen a man’s lifetime already. He was too old for this game already. Her stomach curdled. “Makes you think that?”  
  
“You’re gonna fuck me.”  
  
Dean had done something, moved, in a way Ellen couldn’t see, but she’d heard Jason’s groan roll acid hot in the furious dark.   
  
“Oh yeah?” Jason mouthed against the river reed curve of cheekbone.  
  
“Yeah,” Dean rasped, light as air, dark and reckless and deep as the sea. “Hard. You’re – shit – you’re gonna fuck me, hard, right here.”  
  
The slick sound of their kiss drenched the air, humid, stifling. Ellen’s feet, tendons, had tingled for the bite of fresh winter air. She hadn’t moved.  
  
“You got anything, kid?” Jason panted.   
  
There was the soft sound of fabric dropping. “Don’t need it.”  
  
“You are,” Jason laughed. He had murmured words Ellen couldn’t hear, syllables muffled by Dean’s young lamb flesh, his breathless moans.  
  
“Ready for you,” Dean had groaned, shifting to turn, brace his palms on the wall. She could see a ring on glint as his fingertips slid down the wall, curling into his hand with a shudder. A strange, modern shaped spark of light had shown the fruit wet, wine dark slash of his open mouth. “Slicked up soon as I saw you. Got three fingers in me, fucked myself ready for you.”  
  
Jason laughed again, wild, disbelieving, thirsty. “God damn, kid. How much?”  
  
“Huh?” Dean had asked. Ellen could hear the pinch of his brow, the furrow of his thoughts, in the panted breath.  
  
“Gotta make sure I can afford you. So much prettier than the holes I usually find here. So much  _sluttier_ , too. Swear I can taste how bad you want it.”  
  
Bristling, Ellen had clenched her fist. She knew there were prowlers, prey, roaming her Roadhouse, but her gut twisted at Jason’s flippant words.  
  
Dean’s mouth had fallen open further, edges dripping sluggish, before the barest hint of disbelief twisted his lips. He’d smiled, then, secret and alone and far too young.  
  
“Uh – “ he muttered. He pursed his lips, thinking. “Sixty. Sixty to fuck me.”  
  
“Really? Not trying to fuck myself here, pretty, but you should up your prices.”  
  
Tonight, Dean is taking Jason’s advice.  
  
“Fifty to suck you off,” Dean is saying. The words are dry, soft and tussled as a peach, and she imagines he is mouthing the fabric of Gray’s boxers. “Hundred if you want to fuck me.”  
  
“Just – ”Gray pants. “Your mouth. Fuck, your – the god damn pretty mouth on you, kid.”  
  
Ellen should be less worried about the damage Gray could do: he’s gruffly but gently spoken, deep green eyes lined with crinkled joy (happiness of a past life, the one every hunter had before a demon or vamp or ghoul stole their spark), and gentle hands. But she’s more alert, now, in the utter absence of light and the bewildered beat of her thoughts.   
  
Dean had been slithering at Gray’s feet for the past two days, worrying the thin fabric holding him together with wide eyes and smiles, slick lips and fluttering touches. She had thought he wouldn’t break him: if any hunter in that heap had the decency to keep their hands off Dean’s butterfly body, Dean’s sun drenched temptation, it would be Gray.  
  
She’s been wrong before, overestimating the goodness in a human soul. The disappointment still makes her want to reach for a shotgun.  
  
She’ll stand by the edge, watch as Dean jumps willingly and purposefully over it, and after the fall, she’ll set his bones and have a firm, iron armed discussion with his daddy. The thought makes her fingers itch. She doesn’t know if its nerves, disgust, the desire to sink them into John’s nose after Jason’s and Gray’s; decides it’s most likely a combination.  
  
Slick sloshing sounds echo, bouncing against dark corners, hitting shadowed angles. The noises are amplified by the sick drip at the back of Ellen’s throat.   
  
She wonders how many times Dean has done this and decides immediately that she does not want to know the answer and that she despises her brain for producing such a shaking, disturbing question. Theories, uninvited, unwanted, float bone breaking behind her eyes, though, and she clenches her jaw.  
  
How many times has Dean bruised his knees by sucking cock on cold concrete? How many times has John never noticed the hobble or the swollen, spit soaked heat of Dean’s mouth? Does Sam have any idea? Is this one of the things that makes the youngest whimper desperate in his sleep? Why is Dean here, mouth being stuffed, hair being pulled, pulling apart a man who tried at least to be good and himself in the process?  
  
“Oh, shit,” Gray stutters. He sounds as if he’s sobbing, Dean’s sucks pulling tears and blood from him, hurting him deep, cutting so close to the bone Gray is only shaking in shock now. “Shit, shit, I’m going to Hell, but f-fuckin’  _shit_ …”  
  
An obscene pop echoes through the alley.   
  
“I can take you deeper,” Dean rasps, voice rough with too much spit and heavy pre-come, throat raw from being fucked too wide. “Let me.” It’s a whine, bratty, but Ellen knows the high plea will shake any trembling bar of Gray’s resistance free. Dean’s stroking his ego and his dick with one dripping wet lick.   
  
Gray mutters another ‘shit’ before falling into a litany of denials. “Don’t want to hurt you,” he breathes. “This is – so damn good – I can finish like this.”  
  
“ _Please_ ,” Dean begs. He sounds young, as if he’s really crying for the burning stretch of a fat dick in his throat. “I can suck you  _so good_ , deep throat you, swallow your come, please –  _want_ it. Don’t you want it, Gray? Want to watch me drink your jizz? Want to give it to me?”   
  
Gray groans and a slick slither of a sound echoes. Dean must be licking Gray’s cock, digging the delicate point of his bubblegum pink tongue in Gray’s slit, tonguing the pre-come out of Gray’s cock.   
  
“You do want to give it to me, don’t you Gray?” Dean asks again, sounding sweet and raw.  “Make me feel good?”  
  
“Y-yeah,” Gray answers helplessly.   
  
“That’ll make me feel so good. That’s what’ll make me come, Gray, when you choke me with your cock and give me every drop of your come.”  
  
“Fuckin’  _shit_.  _Fuckin’ fuck shit_.”  
  
And that’s the reason, the  _why_ , Dean is making choked, hurt, garbled noises as he’s stuffed full of the cock he siren sung past his lips.   
  
Dean is a soldier to the very bone; his dog tags may even be carved in his spine. He kills, he protects Sammy. There can be achievements in his fields, a place to glut himself on blood and glory and violent lust, but there is no pleasure, no affection, no  _feel good warm safe_  in a soldier’s life.   
  
He will never be a good enough soldier for John’s kind words or endearment; those aren’t John’s forte, too soft for the shell he’s hidden his broken heart in. He will never save Sammy from everything or everyone from anything. Other hunters love and lose, but Dean was born and raised into this shabby town existence. His hunger for intimacy and the flavors he craves are fucked towards pain and shadows and the ambiguity necessary to take a life.   
  
This is the one thing Dean wants he seems to see no reason to deny himself. It’s dangerous, puts his throat and the blood of his family at risk, but Ellen thinks Dean is addicted to the adrenaline edge of hunting already. A razor point at the end of his trysts must be why he gravitates towards men old enough to be his daddy (she  _hopes_ it’s why,  _hopes_ it’s a wicked need for risk that draws his lips to stubble chins).   
  
Her college psych professor would be thrilled she has such a complex case to apply what she learned.   
  
Moans and groans perfume the night, more shrill and desperate as the stars twinkling dead in space. Ellen can almost feel the pleasure-pain sounds, live, restless animals landing on her skin, crawling underneath. She digs her nails into her palm until she can feel blood singing towards the surface. With a low sound, she spreads her fingers straight.  
  
A slurp, slide, aching moan, spills, then Dean is speaking again. “Fuck me,” he whispers, sounding broken, desperate, as if Gray, his cock and his come and his attention, is all that can repair the cracks inside of him. “C’mon, fuck my face, know you want to.”  
  
Gray makes a garbled sound.  
  
Laughing softly, Dean says, “You don’t have to keep your hips still. It’s okay. Done this before, know how to take it.”  
  
“Gonna tear you apart,” Gray nearly sobs. The apology is heavy on his voice.   
  
“No,” Dean soothes, voice softening the same way it does when Sammy is upset, the way Ellen heard it ease when Jo had cut her palm on a broken bottle outside and Dean had wrapped it for her. “Promise. Gotten my throat fucked before, taken bigger cocks than yours.”  
  
“God damn, Dean – ”  
  
“Didn’t taste as good though, swear I didn’t want them as bad.” Gray has to know Dean’s smothering on charm, but he’s lying so sweetly, so tempting, Ellen knows Gray won’t be able to tear his fingers from the fantasy. “They weren’t so nice, either, fucked me ‘til my throat was all raw.”  
  
“Bet you liked it,” Gray murmurs, sounding dizzy, shamed, desperate.  
  
“Loved it,” Dean answers. Ellen can hear the honest slices in it. “Please, Gray, know you want to.”  
  
Gray must want to – must hate that he wants to but wants to nonetheless – because there is a scramble of sounds, wet and messy. Ellen thinks she knows the exact moment Gray has slid Dean’s mouth to the base of his cock. Dean makes a heavy, gagging sound followed by a deeper moan, and Ellen does know that Gray has started scraping Dean back and forth on his cock, sliding his slick lips over the thick, angry flesh, jerking Dean until his jaw clacks and his throat closes around the mushroom head of Gray’s spurting dick.  
  
Ellen stands with the back of her head against the brick, rough surface scratching her hair and skull, as Gray fucks himself dizzy in Dean’s mouth and floods his young, rabbit soft throat with come. She presses her fingertips against the harsh texture of the wall, rubbing until they sting, as she hears Gray shrug his jeans back on, dig into his wallet, kiss Dean one last time.   
  
“Night,” Dean says softly as Gray departs.   
  
Gray doesn’t reply; the realization of what he’s just done to this desperate boy-child must be squeezing him silent. He travels down the alley, away from the Roadhouse, from the parking lot where his motorcycle sits. She can see the harsh line of his spine and shoulder blades when he finally stumbles, drunk from Dean’s mouth, under a streetlight.  
  
Dean stays for several moments, panting in the darkness. Ellen wonders if he’s questioning what he’s done, reveling in it; if he’s even thinking about it at all, or if his mind is already spinning forward.   
  
He moves through the darkness until she can make out the faintest shape of his form, can guess at the hint of color in his clothes and on his cheeks. He’s about five feet of shadows away from her when he stops.  
  
“Ellen?” he calls. His voice is still rough and Ellen feels her stomach roll, dinner clenching cold inside.  
  
“What the hell do you think you’re doin’, boy?” she hisses in response, although she knows exactly what he’s doing; knows he knows exactly what he’s doing, too.   
  
Dean steps forward until his features are a delicate, ethereal blur in the dim light. He reminds Ellen of a spirit, soft, dangerous, sorrowed. His golden mouth is lifted.  
  
“Just, uh, gettin’ to know Gray,” he says, smiling easy and melted plastic. He shrugs a little, adding, “And makin’ a little extra cash.”  
  
She shakes her head, reminds herself that even if a good beating and a long hug are exactly what Dean needs, she’s not the one he needs it from.   
  
“But I don’t charge for ladies,” he says. His voice has dropped, sultry, southern humid heat.   
  
Ellen narrows her eyes. “You ever talk to me like that again,” she says, words instantly wiping the lazy smirk from Dean’s face. “I’ll slap you so hard you can’t even count to fifty.”  
  
“Yes,” he replies quickly. “Ma’am.”  
  
She sighs. “What are you doin’, boy?” she asks again, softer this time, only to herself.  
  
“Are you gonna tell my dad? Can you – ” He hesitates, glances down the alley. “Can you wait until Gray is out of here, if you do? He’s – he won’t deserve whatever my dad’ll try to do to him.”  
  
“Go to bed,” she tells him, ignoring the question. It eases the ache in her chest by a soft breath that Dean at least doesn’t want Gray caught in the crossfire of consequences.   
  
He nods, moving gingerly past her, careful not to brush her shoulder. Before he pushes the door open, he pauses.   
  
“You know I don’t – I would never lead Jo on, or do anything to her, ever.”  
  
Ellen searches what she can see of his emerald gaze. There is sincerity there. It eases another pang, deeper in her heart, because Jo has been tracking his movements with wide, interested eyes since John dropped them off. She’s not naive but Dean is no novice at seduction or at – she suspects – destruction.   
  
“I know,” she says. He seems relieved, breathing out heavily. “Because if you even think about touching my baby girl, ever, I’ll shoot your balls full of rock salt.”  
  
-  
  
Two days later (two trysts with Gray, another night with Jason, and a heavy make out session with a twenty-something-blonde-boy she’d never seen before), John walks in to collect his boys.  
  
“They’re just packing up,” Ellen tells him as he takes a seat at the bar. “Thirsty?”  
  
“Coke,” he says, nodding. “Thanks.” As she pours his drink, he asks, “Boys behave themselves?”  
  
“Hmm? Oh, yeah. They’re sweet kids. Sammy’s just precious.”  
  
“How was Dean?”  
  
She glances at him as she slides the Coke towards his seat, searching his gaze for any hint of awareness or concern.  
  
“He was good,” she assures him. Licking her lips, she reaches for another cloth, swiping a splash of water. “It was an interesting week around here, though.”  
  
She keeps her voice clipped, careful. The goal here isn’t to get Dean punished, shamed, judged by his father. The goal is to protect a boy who needs it more fiercely than she’s ever seen.  
  
“What’d he do?” John sighs.  
  
“Nothin’,” she repeats, frustration already building. “I told you, Dean is a sweet kid. I don’t understand why you’re so hard on him.”  
  
John looks away, jaw clenching. “He lacks self-discipline,” he says gruffly.  
  
“Oh, well, since you’ve been the perfect example of self-discipline I can’t imagine where he could get that from.”  
  
Dark eyes drop to the dark glass. John doesn’t say a word.  
  
Wringing her hands in the towel, Ellen sighs. “And he’s plenty disciplined. Kept himself and Sammy out of trouble.”  
  
“Hmph,” John snorts over his glass, fogging it. It must be what his brain looks like, she thinks with an internal roll of her eyes and tightening of her stomach.   
  
She wants to shake him until the sour chocolate flurry in his gaze is gone, until he can see his sons and the life he’s weaving for them, until he falls off the stool, but she needs to tread carefully through the minefield that is John Winchester’s brain and mouth and burning moods.  
  
“And there was a lot of trouble,” she says, letting the words fall casual from her tongue onto the bar, onto John’s lap, where he can take or leave them.  
  
“What kind of trouble?”  
  
“Oh, the usual.” She makes herself breathe through the motions of stacking glasses before continuing. “A couple kids tryin’ to make a few bucks the wrong way.”  
  
She watches his reaction with sharp, assessing eyes. There is no tension in the thick, bunched coils of his forearms, dark with black hair and sweat. There is no glitter of darkness in his eyes. There is nothing.   
  
Enough creatures and people have trembled under her interrogations for her to recognize a mask when it’s lain, cemented and blank.   
  
“Some kids just need attention,” he says with a shrug. “Not satisfied with what they get. It’s – ” He pauses, swallowing harsh, cutting his throat on nothing but his own clear denial. “This generation. All these kids want all this attention, all the time. It’ll pass, though. When they’re older, when they understand - ”   
  
He cuts himself off abruptly, severing his words with an iron sword, a swift, clacking strike. His body is wound tight around his soul. He’s said too much, he thinks, and he takes a final gulp of his Coke.   
  
“It’s just a phase. It’ll pass.”  
  
Ellen turns, hides her own tick of frustration and rising bile boil anger. A phase. A passing longing, a passing risk of growth. She could scream; she could wring his neck until he admits to himself Dean’s Lolita breath has woven its way into his blood cells, saturated his skin, and if John isn’t careful Dean will tomb himself in easy pleasure on a harsh ocean edge.  
  
One day, the sea of hunger and sex and need will swallow him, crush his bones. The waters, ebony and thick as blood, will never give his body back.  
  
“Maybe,” she says instead of yelling or throwing a glass at John’s head. “It sure does break your heart, though, seein’ kids like that. Lost their parents to the demons or the hunt – ” He glances up at that, but she keeps barreling forward. “Lookin’ for someone to show ‘em how to be normal kids, even for a little while.”  
  
“It’s  _not_ ,” John growls, fingertips tightening around the glass. “It’s not  _normal_. What they’re doing.” He shakes his head. “Nothin’s gonna be normal for any of us. No one who walks through those doors has anything normal or is going to again. All these kids need to understand that, realize this their life, grow up – ”  
  
“Sometimes they’re too young to grow up.” Her heart is beating fiercely in her ears, all protective blood rush and mother nature instinct, wild and protective and everywhere.   
  
John watches her through a fan of ebony lashes. She’s seen Dean glance at men that way, sometimes shy, sometimes deafening with heat; she’s even seen Dean watch men the way John is watching her now, assessing, evaluating, weighing value and risk. She has to turn again, bury her anger in the gleam of clean glasses.   
  
The sickness in John’s head has burrowed its way under Dean’s skin. John isn’t going to acknowledge the infection, wouldn’t anyway, even if Dean was rotting before his eyes, but especially not when he’s patient zero.  
  
-  
  
The Winchesters stay another night. John is tired, hard hunt, he’d said, but the exhaustion hadn’t truly set his bones until after the futile attempt to discuss Dean’s disturbed, sobbing for attention actions.  
  
Sammy is standing with Jo by the jukebox. He doesn’t know what he wants to play, only knows the songs Dean likes and that he wants to listen to something else for once. It’s then she realizes neither John and Dean are at the bar, at a table, playing pool.   
  
An ice finger grows like a slithering seed in her gut. Something twists, something nags. She moves to rustle Sammy’s hair, kiss Jo’s forehead, before telling them she’s going to make sure there are enough sheets for them in the room. The kids don’t pay her much attention, still shifting through the records, and she smiles, heart aching as much for her own family as the Winchester’s.   
  
There are voices, deep, moving soft but betraying anger, tumbling from the room Sammy, Dean and John are sharing. It’s cracked a smidge; one of them must have kicked it shut and not noticed when it swung open slightly. She adds it to the mental checklist of the million things she needs to touch up around the Roadhouse.   
  
She hesitates. There is no reason, really, to linger at the door and listen. This isn’t Dean slipping men into dark corners and smoothing what he wants, needs, hungers for, from them. This isn’t an interrogation John is performing on a monster. This is a father and son who  _need_ a chance to sort their shit out more than anyone Ellen knows.   
  
Just as she turns, the gruff tumble of John’s voice booms. It carries the gravel rough scratch John speaks with only when he’s angry; enraged.  
  
Ellen toes her way to the door. She glances through the slit, catches brief flashes of John’s jacket and Dean’s jeans as John pushes him to the bed. Dean’s knee is shaking, jittery, and half of John’s stone face is twitching. It’s all she can see.  
  
“Dammit, Dean, I thought you were past this.”  
  
“I am,” Dean insists. “I swear, Dad, I am. It’s – ” He drops his gaze, demure. “It’s these guys. I don’t know what to do. They – they put their hands on me and I don’t want to start a fight – ”  
  
“I’d rather you break their fucking fingers than let – ” John growls. He glances away, eyes shut tight, fist clenched.   
  
Dean licks his lips. Ellen can’t see the gleam of his eyes, can’t read them, but there is a slick roll tumbling down the knobs of her spine. There is a twisted note of affection, of concern, of  _jealousy_ , in John’s voice. She wonders, suddenly, how Dean realized he could affect men the way he does, how he could seduce and charm and suck what he craved from their bones.   
  
“Than what, Dad?” Dean asks softly.  
  
John isn’t buying his vulnerable affected innocence. “You know exactly what,” he snaps harshly.   
  
Lowering his lashes, picture of demure fawn seduction, he says, “I never let ‘em touch me, Dad. I swear.”  
  
The gentle words stir something ugly in John. A cold noise of anger snarls in his mouth and he marches forward, twisting the wheat kissed locks of Dean’s hair. Dean grimaces but manages not to squeak, to whimper, to flinch at the pain as John yanks at him.  
  
“It’s this,” John says, sounding breathless. “This – and your lips, and the way you – you stare at them. Like you’re some – ” He shakes his head, releases his hold on Dean’s. The boy nearly bounces at the loss. John turns, then, broad back to his trembling son. “We’re gonna cut your hair and your gonna stop – stop looking at people the way you do.”  
  
He breathes out heavily through his nose. Ellen wants to break it. She wants to rush in, gather Dean in her arms, break John Winchester’s fucking face, and never look back.  
  
When he turns back around, his body is sagging, muscles loose and trembling. There is no hope on his face.  
  
“There are so many sick people out there, Dean,” he says. “You’re playing with fire and I don’t want to watch you burn.”  
  
For a brief moment, John is tender. He is the phantom image of a father, a scraped coal outline of a guardian. It is woven of sick, ugly roots, a desire Ellen is beginning to smell and choke on, a chaos she is beginning to see wrecked in John’s head.  
  
Dean’s face softens. “I know. M’sorry.” He glances down, stares at his feet for a few moments before bringing his gaze back. “Dad? Come here.”  
  
The swallow John takes is practically obscene, snake swallowing a bird egg whole, because Ellen can read the wicked shudder as clear as black on white.   
  
If John touches him, she’ll kill him. Her place be damned, she’ll pump him full of lead. She is quiet, keeps her breathing soft and slow, as she slides a hand behind her back.   
  
“Dad,” Dean repeats, firm tone playful falling him from his butter cream lips. “It’s okay.”  
  
The words annihilate whatever flimsy dam was holding John back. He flows into the space beside his son, neck loose as his head hangs. He looks lost.  
  
Dean rubs his palm along John’s bicep, rubbing heat into the surely sore muscle. Ellen can’t see John’s face as it dips but she can hear the sound he makes, pitiful from the lips of a father, hungry and loathing from the lips of a man.  
  
The noise triggers another colossal break. Dean shifts to sit sideways, little body pressed so tightly to his daddy’s their bones might sink together. He squirms like he’s aching to get closer before sliding his right calf behind John’s waterfall spine, sliding his entire left leg over John’s lap.  
  
John snaps instantly, as if his body was a band stretched miles farther than it was meant to. His rough hands fall to the young line of Dean’s denim clad calf, knee; he pulls his hands away the moment they brush his son’s body.  
  
“Dean,” he chokes, nearly as desperate as Gray when he had Dean on his knees but far darker, guiltier. “What are you – ”  
  
“Just rubbing your shoulders,” Dean explains in breathy reassurance, as if it’s normal to spread his legs into an obscene v around his daddy’s middle, press himself close enough he could rub his stiff cock against his daddy’s clothed hip.   
  
John’s half-horrified expression says that least this isn’t normal for John, for their family. But the poison apples of his cheeks flame with more than shock, and Ellen isn’t sure how long this scene won’t be their nightly routine.   
  
Hands too rough for a boy so young begin to knead John’s muscles. Dean makes a soothing sound, so very lulling, his breath a drug to slow John’s brain and body, and for a moment, John allows it. He allows Dean to whisper everything is okay, Dean to swipe his thumbs through the tension between his shoulder blades, Dean’s leg to shift against his thighs. John grips Dean’s knee beneath one huge hand, but Dean doesn’t still, still pressing closer, wriggling his thigh on John’s lap, and John allows that, too.  
  
Ellen promised herself she would put lead through John’s skull before she let him touch his son the way he is now, but her fingers are shaking. Dean is worth more than Winchester blood on sprayed paint thin on her collar. He is. She finds herself unable to move, though, her body suddenly alien, language suddenly nothing but a blur in her brain.  
  
Then John pushes Dean’s legs from his lap, movement violent. He stands quick and harsh and moves to the door as if staying still will turn him to stone.  
  
Breath flooding her body in a sudden jolt, Ellen slinks from the door, rounding a corner in the hall and pressing herself against the wall.   
  
She can’t hear John’s parting words, but she does hear his voice. Dean’s voice rings out, too, clearer than his daddy’s. Her muscles, still trembling, nearly freeze again as she reaches for the handgun in her jeans.   
  
As she slides it into her hands, she hears the door to their room slam. She hears John sigh heavily, curse buried under the breath, and fall against the door.  
  
At least the son of a bitch seems to realize he’s fucked up, fucked his son up, over.   
  
When John turns the corner, Ellen is cocking the gun.  
  
He takes in the piece, the relaxed line of her body against the wall, the smile on her face more confident than she feels.  
  
“Ellen,” he says after a moment. He sounds somber – and not the least bit surprised.  
  
“You’re some kind of bastard, Winchester.”  
  
A shadow crosses his face. “You don’t – ”  
  
The open and close of a door slices his words at the core. Ellen doesn’t want Dean to find her and his daddy with this tension between them, but John is stiff and still as the dead at the sound.   
  
As quickly as he freezes, he thaws, and he’s moving into the bar without a glance behind him.  
  
Ellen is going to shoot him in his sleep, Heaven help her find a good place to bury the body.  
  
She’s still watching the space John would be occupying if he weren’t a line of slime on the earth as Dean rounds the corner, feet finding his daddy’s footsteps.  
  
“Ellen,” he sees, fun house mirror of his father. He mutters a breath, un-amused smile crossing his face as he touches the tip of his tongue to his lip. “You training for Ninja Warrior? Just recently embrace a voyeur lifestyle?”  
  
“You know I don’t think that’s cute,” she counters. His eyes catch on her gun before he can respond, and they widen for a moment before settling too blank. She eases the piece back into her jeans.  
  
“He’s never touched me,” Dean says fiercely. He’s not looking Ellen in the eyes, but his gaze is earnest and dark. “I swear.” She believes him, sick as she feels about it, tonight; she knows, though, the words won’t be true for long. Then Dean says, “I don’t even know if he would.”  
  
She expects a plastic veil dancing along Dean’s gaze, curved eyelets revealing the bullshit he knows he’s spinning. Instead she finds a pensive calm on his gravity centered features. He is looking down the line of the hall, eyes soft and focused on the doors leading into the bar.   
  
His emerald sparks more curious than heated, as if Dean’s trial of seduction is an experiment measuring his own beauty and rotten candy allure as opposed to a desperate sacrifice of his body, as if Dean is curious to learn if his daddy is as malleable and breakable as every other man.  
  
“I don’t even know where to start with you, boy,” she sighs, sagging against the wall.  
  
“I am – ” he says, hesitant. “I get that this is not your shit. You don’t want to be in it and I – I get it. I’m sorry.”   
  
“Anything I can say to get you to stop being such a dumbass?” she asks casually, rubbing her index and thumb nail together.   
  
If he asked her to stay, she’d let him. If he asked her to help him, help him do what she doesn’t know, she’d offer more.  
  
He smiles at her, so genuine she almost believes him.   
  
“You could really be something,” she tells him sincerely. A startled tick jumps in his lashes. “I mean it, kid. You ain’t worth much now, but if you get your head out of your ass and into the hunt, you might actually do some good. Save some lives.” She’s quiet for a moment before adding, “Save yourself.”  
  
Dean’s laugh is dry. It sounds painful, scratches Ellen own throat.  
  
“You could measure up to a real man if you started acting like one.”  
  
“Yeah?” he responds, swallowing.  
Ellen is at his side in a stinging blink, gripping his biceps with hands that have healed and hurt.   
  
“You take care of yourself,” she tells him fiercely. “You take care of your brother and take care of yourself  _for_ your brother. And when you look in the mirror, and you know you’ve done everything you could to do those things – that’s when you’ll know what your worth is, Dean. That’s how you’ll know.”  
  
Dean bites his lip.   
  
“And,” she adds, suddenly unable to stop speaking. “You never, ever sell what someone who loves you will work for.”  
  
He looks away, skin shuddering under his fingertips, and she can’t stand the empty ache beating from his chest into hers. She wraps her arms around his slender frame, his wing span, wing soft shoulders, holding him against the warmth of her body.  
  
“You don’t let anyone already too broke to fix themselves make you feel anything, you hear me?” she whispers against his hair.   
  
“Yes, ma’am,” he answers, sounding awkward, but he slides his forearms around her shoulders.   
  
“My doors are always open, you understand? You need anything, you pick up a phone and you call me.”  
  
She can hear Dean roll his eyes even as he nods against her. His hands are honest when he clutches her back, though, and she can feel his desperation coursing through her.   
  
Part of her aches to never let the boy go, hold him safe from crow black eyes and his daddy’s hands, but Ellen hasn’t survived years and wars and pain by helping those who don’t ask for it. She can feel it in the sharp juts of Dean’s bones that he isn’t going to be asking for help anytime soon.   
  
Someday, though, because she’s seen summer day warmth, real affection and yearning, in his gaze before, she thinks he will want to claw from the layers he’s pouring on himself.   
  
Someday, he will sink his fingers into the clean domestic cradle he craves, and he will reach out for hands to help steady him.   
  
Ellen can offer him both of hers, worn as they are, when the day comes, because she knows it will. There is something pure hidden between his ribs and unsatisfied hungers and aching flesh.   
  
If Dean doesn’t bury his light beneath sweat and come and filth spread from addict fingers, he could shine one day.   
  
Ellen hopes she’ll see him burn bright. She won’t hold her breath, though, or count the prayers she will write for him.   
  
“You be good for Sammy, okay?” she asks.  
  
“Okay,” he breathes, smiling, and she knows the agreement is a lie.   
  
Dean can’t be good, at least not yet, caged and ravenous as he is. Her soul aches for him, a mother’s ache for spirits of childhood lost, and she runs her fingers through soft hair.   
  
She lets him go a moment later. He squeezes her shoulder before stepping away too, hair mused from her fond touch, smile deep from her breath of fresh concern.  
  
“Be careful,” she tells him as he turns from her to move into the bar.  
  
“I will,” he promises over his shoulder.  
  
She knows he won’t.


End file.
